Key Focus Question: How can you structure small-group activities in your classroom to develop collaborative working and build self-confidence?
Keywords: family; history; confidence; investigation; small-group work; discussion
By the end of this section, you will have:
Good teaching often starts by encouraging pupils to explore situations that they are already familiar with. In terms of history, this means using their own lives, and the lives of their immediate families, as a source of investigation. The skills used to explore this familiar history can then be used in the study of broader historical questions.
All of us have a history, which starts from the moment we are born. This will include all our experiences and all the people we interact with.
In this section, you start by exploring your pupils’ immediate family situations and their roles and responsibilities within the family. You will also look at the wider context of the extended family. As you work in this area, you will have to be sensitive to different backgrounds and family or other structures that your pupils live in.
When investigating the family, it is useful to first explore pupils’ understanding of what a family is and show them the diversity among families. Celebrating such diversity helps pupils feel better about themselves when they realise how different families can be. Case Study 1 and Activity 1 explore different ways to do this.
In the case study, the teacher encourages his pupils to work in small groups (see Key Resource: Using group work in your classroom) and to remember the rules that they have agreed for small-group discussions.
Mr Nguzo is a social studies teacher at Muhimu Primary School in Tanzania. He wants his pupils in Standard 3 to learn about families and the roles of different family members.
He organises groups of not more than six; he puts pupils together who do not usually work with each other.
In the groups, pupils take it in turns to answer the following questions, which he has written on the board.
During the discussion, Mr Nguzo goes to each group to check that all the pupils are being given a chance to contribute. After 10 to 15 minutes, he asks the groups to share with the whole class what they have found out about different families: What were the similarities between the families? What were the differences? (For younger or less confident pupils, he would have to ask more structured questions, e.g. ‘Who had the most brothers?’)
Then he asks the groups to consider this question:
After 10 minutes, one member of each group presents their answers to question 6 to the class. Mr Nguzo prepares a large, basic kinship chart to help focus the discussion (see Resource 1: Kinship chart).
Mr Nguzo and the pupils note that although there are words in their language that express cousin, uncle and aunt, these relations are normally referred to as brother or sister; grandfather, father are usually simply father; grandmother, mother are similarly simply mother. There is a distinction between the uncles and aunts from the mother’s side and those from the father’s side. Mr Nguzo realises that teaching pupils about the relationships within families can be confusing for younger pupils.
When studying past events, it is important to help pupils understand the passage of time and how things change from generation to generation.
Developing the ways that young pupils look at their family histories will help them link events together as well as put them in sequence. Resource 2: Another kinship chart provides a family tree that will help pupils see relationships between family members, e.g. their cousin is their mother’s or father’s sister’s or brother’s child
Lucky Xaba plans to teach about family relations over time with her Grade 5 pupils.
She cuts a series of pictures from magazines of people of different ages, doing different things, e.g. at a wedding, a school prize day, and writes numbers on the back of each picture. She tells her pupils that the photographs represent different events in one person’s life and asks her pupils, in groups of six, to sequence the photos in terms of the age of the person. She gives them 15 minutes to discuss the order and then asks each group to feed back. She asks why they chose the order they did and lists the clues they found in the pictures to help them order the events. They discuss the key events shown in the pictures and Mrs Xaba tells the pupils they have made a ‘timeline’ of life.
Resource 3: My timeline can be a starting point for your class to do their own timeline.
Helping pupils to develop their understanding of past and present takes time, and involves giving them a range of activities where they have to observe, ask questions and make judgements about what they find out.
How can they develop skills to help them think about how things change over time? Case Study 3 and the Key Activity use the wider environment to extend your pupils’ understanding of time passing and things changing.
Mr Tshiki, Mrs Nyoka and Miss Qeqe planned their social studies together. They did not all do the same topic at the same time, but it helped them to share ideas.
They all read Key Resource: Using the local community/environment as a resource. They planned to take their classes to visit an older member of the community to talk to them about how the village has changed since they were a child. They decided to organise the classes into groups and each group would prepare questions to ask the elder. Each group would have a different area to think about such as games they played, food they ate, houses they lived in etc.
Do a brainstorm with your class. Ask them to consider how they could investigate the ways in which life for their families has changed in the village/community over time. What sources could they use to find out about this?
They are likely to come up with ideas such as: using their own observations and memories to think about what has changed in their own lifetime; asking their parents; talking to other older people; talking to people in authority (such as the chief); looking at older maps; using a museum (if there is one); reading from books about the area etc.
Ask the pupils to gather stories from their own families about how life has changed for them over the last few generations. What was everyday life like for their grandparents and great grandparents? What are the family stories from previous times? Does the family have any old newspapers, photos, letters, etc. that help show what life used to be like?
Pupils could share their stories with each other in class and use them as a basis for presentations – these could include pictures of what they think life was like, role plays about life in the past, written factual accounts based on family stories and other documents, and imaginary stories e.g. ‘describe a day in the life of your grandmother when she was young’.
Teacher resource for planning or adapting to use with pupils
A kinship chart shows how each person is related or connected to the others and their family or community. Different cultures have different ways of describing relatives.
Below is a simple kinship chart for South Africa.
Me | My Parents | My Grandparents |
Father________ | Grandfather________ | |
Grandmother________ | ||
My Brothers/ Sisters ________ ________ ________ | Mother________ | Grandfather________ |
Grandmother________ |
Teacher resource for planning or adapting to use with pupils
Teacher resource for planning or adapting to use with pupils
Key Focus Question: How can you develop your pupils’ thinking skills in history, using oral and written sources?
Keywords: evidence; history; thinking skills; interviews; questions; investigations
By the end of this section, you will have:
When we study history as part of social studies, we place a great deal of importance on the sources of evidence that can tell us something about the past.
There are two important ways of gathering evidence about the past – finding and analysing documents that record what happened and using oral history. Oral history is the gathering of people’s stories about particular events. We can also look at objects, pictures and buildings from the past to find out more.
In this section, you will encourage your pupils to investigate documents and conduct oral interviews in order to help build their understanding of their own past. It is important to encourage pupils to ask questions and listen to each other’s ideas, so they develop skills in assessing evidence and drawing conclusions.
Teaching history does not only involve facts about historical events, but also the development of pupils’ historical skills. As a teacher, you need give your pupils the opportunity to develop and practise these skills. The kinds of events you explore with your pupils will depend on their ages. With younger children, you will also take more of a lead in helping them find out and understand what happened.
In this part, pupils will conduct oral interviews with an older family member or another member of the community. The aim of the interview is to find out how different their own lifestyles and interests are, compared with those of people in the past. By showing pupils how to conduct an oral interview, you can help develop important skills – being able to see the value of oral history and being able to listen. (Read Resource 1: Oral history now to find out more about this valuable resource.)
Case Study 1 shows how one teacher introduced her pupils to the idea of using oral history to find out about the past. Read this before trying Activity 1 with your class.
Every person has a history. Mrs Eunice Shikongo, a Grade 5 teacher at Sheetheni School on the outskirts of Windhoek in Namibia, wants her pupils to explore their own family histories by interviewing one family member.
First, she discusses what oral evidence is, by encouraging pupils to share things they have learned from their grandparents. She asks them: ‘Has what you have learned been written down?’ Most agree that things learned in this way are not written, but passed on by word of mouth. Mrs Shikongo then explains that, by conducting an interview, pupils will collect oral evidence about what the past was like and will find out what a valuable source of evidence this can be.
She helps them compile a list of interesting questions to use to interview their family members (see Resource 2: Possible interview questions). The pupils then add their own questions to the list before carrying out these interviews at home.
The next day, they share their findings with the rest of their class. Mrs Shikongo summarises their findings on the board under the heading ‘Then’. Next, she asks them to answer the same questions about their own lives, and summarises this information under the heading ‘Now’. She asks them to think about how their lives are different from the lives of their family members in the past. She then asks the pupils, in pairs, to compare ‘Then’ and ‘Now’. Younger pupils write two/three sentences using words from the board. Older pupils write a short paragraph.
Older person | Me |
I would travel to market by donkey
| I travel to market by bus |
| |
|
As well as using oral histories to find out about life in the past, you can use written records with your pupils.
In this section, we look at how different sets of records can help pupils build up their understanding of the past. In Activity 2 and the Key Activity, pupils explore written records of past events and conduct oral interviews with community members. How you organise and gather resources together is part of your role and advice is given on how you might do this.
Mr Thabo Sinono is a teacher of Grade 6 at the MorrisIsaacsonSchool in Soweto, South Africa. The 30th anniversary of the Soweto uprising of 1976 is coming up, and he remembers that students from Morris Isaacson played a central role in that event.
He sends his class to the library where they read up on the events. Two local newspapers, The Star and The Sowetan, have just published supplements commemorating the uprisings and he reads extracts from these to his pupils to stimulate their interest. These articles contain profiles on over twenty of the prominent student leaders of 1976, their lives and what has become of them. Many are now famous politicians, renowned business people or intellectuals. He divides his class into groups and asks each group to take one of these people and to research and then write a profile of that person on a poster, for display in the school hall. The poster must include how they were involved and what has happened to them since.
Mr Sinono’s pupils then plan to present their findings to the whole school. Their posters are displayed around the hall and some of the pupils speak at the assembly.
Resource 3: Celebrating the 1976 Soweto uprising gives some background information.
This activity is built on a visit to a museum, in this case Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, but you could use a more local site. (If it is not possible for you to visit a museum, you could collect together some newspaper articles, pictures and books to help your pupils find out for themselves about an event.)
Decide on a particular historical event that you wish your pupils to investigate during the visit to the museum (or in class if you have the resources), e.g. the role children played in the uprising in Soweto on 16 June 1976. It is important that you focus the attention of your pupils on a particular event, especially if they are visiting a museum covering many years of the past.
Back in class, ask the pupils in their groups to write up their findings on large posters. Display these in the classroom or school hall for all to see.
This part is intended to extend your ideas of how to help pupils use oral history as a resource for finding out about the past. You will encourage them to think critically about the validity and reliability of such evidence, and to compare oral testimonies of a historical event with written evidence of the same event. Investigating the similarities and differences in the two types of evidence provides an exciting learning opportunity for pupils.
Mrs Barika Kainda teaches social studies to Grade 6 at a small school just outside East London. Many of the families have older members who remember or were part of the Soweto uprising of 1976. Resource 3 gives some background information. Mrs Kainda has invited two people to come to the school, to speak about their experiences. (See Key Resource: Using the local community/environment as a resource as this will help you plan and organise such a visit.) They will come on consecutive days as they do not know each other and have differing views about the uprising.
Mrs Kainda warns her class that these two women are now very old, and that an older person’s memory is not always very good. Before the guests arrive, the pupils prepare some questions that they want to ask the women. Over two days, the visitors come and tell their stories. The pupils listen carefully and ask them questions.
In the next lesson, Mrs Kainda and the class discuss the similarities and differences between the two accounts. They think about why the two women have different views on the events.
Mrs Kainda lists the key points that came out of their stories and also stresses that, when they were young, being part of the Soweto uprising was very important to these women, and they may have romanticised their involvement. She explains that while these oral histories may give pupils some understanding of the Soweto uprising, they may not always be accurate, and the stories that different people tell may vary considerably.
Mrs Kainda believes her class learned a valuable lesson in the uses and problems of gathering oral evidence of history.
Discuss with your pupils whether they think they have enough clear evidence about what happened from the people they spoke to. If not, how could they find out more?
Background information / subject knowledge for teacher
We all have stories to tell, stories about our lives and special events that have taken place. We give our experiences an order and organise such memories into stories. These stories could, if collected together with other people’s memories of the same event, allow us to build up a clearer picture of what actually happened.
Your local community will be a rich source for exploring what happened at a particular event or what it was like to live there 20 years ago. Your pupils could investigate the Ugandan Civil War or some other more local event.
Oral history is not folklore, gossip, hearsay or rumour, but the real history of people told from their perspectives, as they remember it. It involves the systematic collection of living people’s stories of their own experiences. These everyday memories have historical importance. They help us understand what life is like. If we do not collect and preserve those memories, then one day they will disappear forever.
Your stories and the stories of the people around you are unique and can provide valuable information. Because we only live for so many years we can only go back one lifetime. This makes many historians anxious that they may lose valuable data and perspectives on events. Gathering these stories helps your pupils develop a sense of their own identities and how they fit into the story of their home area.
How do you collect people’s stories?
When you have decided what event or activity you want to find out about, you need to find people who were involved and ask if they are willing to tell you their stories.
Contact them to arrange a time of day and tell them what you want to talk about and what you will do.
You need to record what your interviewee says. You can do this by taking notes by hand or possibly by tape recording or video recording.
Having collected your information or evidence, it is important to compare and contrast different people’s views of the same event, so that you can identify the facts from the interpretations that different people put on the same event. You could ask your pupils, in groups, to interview different people and then to write a summary of their findings to share with the rest of the class. These could be made into a book about your class’s investigation into a particular event.
Adapted from: Do History, Website
Teacher resource for planning or adapting to use with pupils
Below are some questions to use with a visitor to find out about an event in the past or how they used to do things in the past. Areas you could explore include:
These three sets of starter questions will help you support your pupils in thinking of their own questions.
(1) Historial events
(2) Games
(3) Growing food
Background information / subject knowledge for teacher
Students spark mass struggle against apartheid in South Africa
by Sérgio Rodrigues
On 16 June 1976, over 10,000 students in the township of Soweto rose up against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Police fired on the protest killing hundreds, and sparked a nationwide rebellion. South Africa now recognises 16 June as ‘Youth Day’ in honour of the victims of that massacre.
Apartheid was a particular form of racist rule in South Africa, in force for most of the 20th century. A legacy of British colonial rule, it was institutionalised by the Afrikaaner white settlers in 1948. It enforced harsh economic exploitation of the Black majority by racist segregation and socio-economic controls.
In the mid-1970s, Black students began to challenge the apartheid educational system, designed to integrate them into a racist and unequal economy. Denied access to jobs set aside for the white minority, Black students received inferior educations. In 1975, the government spent about 15 times more on the education of a white child than on the education of a Black child. As explained by Hendrik Verwoerd, an architect of the apartheid system, ‘Natives must be taught at an early age that equality with the Europeans is not for them.’
The straw that broke the camel’s back was the government’s attempt to impose the oppressor’s language, Afrikaans, as the language of classroom instruction. Enacted in 1953, the law infuriated Black students and teachers, who immediately began organising against it. They set up alternative schools and called it the African Education Movement.
In February 1976, Black students in the Soweto Township, near Johannesburg, began staging protests and boycotting classes when two teachers were dismissed for refusing to teach in Afrikaans. Against the backdrop of growing popular resistance to the use of Afrikaans in the classroom, 300 to 400 members of the South African Student Movement met on 13 June to form the Soweto Students’ Representative Council.
The SSRC, an action committee with representatives from each Soweto school, organised the student demonstration that took place three days later.
The massacre
The students began gathering for the demonstration in the early morning of 16 June. Students from Naledi High School and Morris Isaacson High School planned to march from their respective schools, picking up other students along the way, and then converge at a central point before heading to Orlando Stadium.
The march had been carefully organised as a non-violent protest. SSRC chairperson Tepello Motopanyane had instructed the students at Naledi High to march peacefully and with discipline. When the students heard reports of approaching police forces, SSRC leader Tietsi Mashinini climbed atop a nearby vehicle and reminded them to remain cool.
The state forces, however, did not tolerate any form of opposition to the racist regime. As the march swelled, the police blockaded the route close to Orlando High School. Despite the tense situation, the protesters, by that time numbering a solid 10,000 to 15,000, continued to chant and hold their placards high.
Unable to intimidate the students, the police resorted to savage repression. Dogs were released and teargas was lobbed at the crowd. Then came live rounds. As the first students fell, chaos ensued.
Thirteen year-old Hector Petersen was one of the first victims. The photograph of young Hector being carried away, blood dripping from his mouth, became a symbol of the massacre. He was declared dead on arrival at a local clinic.
Resistance spreads
The students’ initial outrage at the senseless violence soon developed into massive resistance. With little more than stones and bottles, Black youth stood on the front lines and defended themselves against the heavily armed police. Turning against the symbols of apartheid, they set fire to administrative buildings, government-owned liquor stores and officials’ cars. Within hours the South African government sent in the army, shooting indiscriminately at Soweto’s Black youth.
But the people’s fury could not be contained to Soweto. Two days later, the flames of resistance had spread to Pretoria, Durban and towns in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Within four months, 160 communities nationwide had joined in the revolt, using tactics ranging from peaceful protest to sabotage. The state responded with increased violence.
Uprisings continued throughout 1976 and 1977. The rage unleashed by the massacre became an important factor in widening the mass anti-apartheid struggle.
The government-appointed Cillie Commission concluded that 575 people died and 2,389 were injured during the uprisings between 16 June 1976 and 28 February 1977. Both figures have been disputed by various authorities as being gross underestimates. Some sources indicate as many as 600 students were killed on 16 June alone. Instead of killing the movement, the government’s repression radicalised the oppressed and only fuelled their resistance.
The use of the Afrikaans language in the classroom was the spark, but the movement developed a much broader political character and turned against all aspects of the apartheid regime. On the first anniversary of the Soweto massacre, the African National Congress called a strike against segregation, job reservation, police brutality and the Bantu education system.
A turning point
16 June 1976 was not the first massacre at the hands of the apartheid regime. The events of that day evoked memories of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, in which 70 peaceful protestors were shot down. But the Soweto massacre marked a turning point in the anti-apartheid struggle. The heroism and leadership of the middle and high school students galvanised millions of Black South Africans and their supporters to take bolder actions. South Africa’s youth became the vanguard leadership in the struggle against apartheid. It brought the world’s attention and solidarity to the oppressed Black people of the country. Hector Peterson and the other martyrs of 16 June 1976 live today in the struggles of South Africans to take the next steps in erasing the legacy of white apartheid rule for the country’s millions of Black workers.
Adapted from: Socialism and Liberation, Wesbite
Key Focus Question: How can you use mind mapping and fieldwork to develop historical skills?
Keywords: historical skills; mind mapping; fieldwork; investigations; history; maps
By the end of this section, you will have:
In addition to looking at oral and written evidence, your pupils can also learn about the past from other sources, for example maps.
In this section, you will structure lessons and activities that will help pupils understand the factors that led to the emergence of strong African kingdoms in the past. It provides you with insight into the kinds of evidence and resources you can use.
It covers:
By looking at the local environment and the physical layout of the land, it is possible to think about why a community settled in a certain place.
Great Zimbabwe provides a good example. It is important that as a social studies teacher you understand a case like this, as it gives you the skills to relate these ideas to a number of different ancient African kingdoms and to your local setting. Using fieldwork, such as actual trips to a site, allows pupils to see for themselves why one place was chosen for settlement and why some developments survived longer than others.
Most settlements are where they are because the environment provides some kind of resource, such as water or trees, and/or the site provides protection from the elements and, in earlier times, from enemies. Villages and towns are often found near a stream or wood to provide water and wood for shelter and to burn for heat and cooking. By looking closely at your school’s local environment or your pupils’ home environment, whichever is easier, you can help them to begin to understand how settlements developed.
Maps from earlier times will show how a site has changed over time (this can build on the time walk activity from Module 2, Section 1).
Ms Sekai Chiwamdamira teaches a Grade 6 class at a primary school in Musvingo in Zimbabwe. Her school is near the heritage site of Great Zimbabwe. She knows that many of her pupils pass by this magnificent site of stone-walled enclosures on their way to school. But she wonders whether they know why it is there. Ms Sekai wants to help her pupils realise that the landscape and its natural resources played an important part in people’s decision to settle in Great Zimbabwe.
She begins her lesson by explaining how Great Zimbabwe was a powerful African kingdom that existed between 1300 and 1450 (see Resource 1: Great Zimbabwe). She asks the pupils to consider why the rulers of this kingdom chose to settle in the Zimbabwe Plateau rather than anywhere else in Africa. A map is her key resource for this discussion (see Resource 2: Pictorial map of Great Zimbabwe). One by one, she points out the presence of gold, ivory, tsetse fly, water supply and access to trade routes on the map; she asks her pupils to suggest how each of these led people to establish the settlement where they did. As her pupils suggest answers, Ms Sekai draws a mind map on the board (see Key Resource: Using mind maps and brainstorming to explore ideas).
Ms Sekai is pleased at the level of discussion and thinking that has taken place.
Before the lesson, copy the map and questions from Resource 2 onto the chalkboard or have copies ready for each group.
In the past, cattle were always viewed as an important resource, and many farmers and communities still view cattle this way.
The purpose of Activity 2 is for pupils to investigate the traditional role of cattle in African societies using the local community as a source of information. They will then determine how much African farming societies have changed.
Case Study 2 and Activity 2 use mind mapping and a template to help pupils think about the task as they work together in groups to share ideas.
There are many farmers living in the Musvingo area and many of the pupils in the school are children of farmers. Sekai Chiwamdamira wants to investigate with her class how important cattle were to the lifestyle and culture of the early African farmers who settled in Great Zimbabwe. She also wants her pupils to think about the extent to which African farming societies have changed. She plans to use the local community as a resource of information.
Sekai begins her lesson by explaining the important role of cattle in early African societies. She draws a mind map on the chalkboard that highlights the importance of cattle, and what cattle were used for. (See Key Resource: Using mind maps and brainstorming to explore ideas and Resource 3: A mind map about keeping cattle to help you question your pupils.) The class discuss these ideas.
In the next lesson, in small groups with a responsible adult, the pupils go out to interview local farmers. Sekai has talked with them beforehand to see who is willing to talk with her pupils.
The pupils had two simple questions to ask local farmers:
Back in class, they share their findings and Sekai lists their answers on the chalkboard. They discuss what has changed over the years.
Before the lesson, read Resource 4: Cattle in Zulu life
Share each group’s answers with the whole class and display the templates on the wall for several days so pupils can revisit the ideas.
One way to reconstruct how societies in the past lived is to analyse buildings, artefacts, sculptures and symbols found on sites from a long time ago.
In this part, pupils go on a field trip to a place of historical interest. If this is not realistic for your class, it is possible to do a similar kind of task in the classroom by using a range of documents, photographs and artefacts. Pupils can start to understand how to investigate these and fill in some of the gaps for themselves about what used to happen.
Sekai Chiwamdamira has already explored with her pupils that Great Zimbabwe was a powerful political kingdom with a strong king. Now she wants them to think about how we know this. As her school is near the heritage site of Great Zimbabwe, she organises a field trip. She wants the pupils to explore the buildings and artefacts, and think about how historians used this evidence to construct the empire’s history.
At the site, the pupils take notes about what the buildings look like in the Hill Complex, the lower homesteads and the Great Enclosure. They also describe and draw some of the artefacts and symbols that can be found in and around each of these buildings.
Back at school, they discuss all the things they saw and list these on the chalkboard. Aisha asks them to organise their findings under headings for the different types of building they have seen. The pupils then discuss what they think the different buildings were used for, based on what they looked like and the artefacts and sculptures that were found there. Sekai helps fill in the gaps by explaining aspects of Shona culture and the meaning of some of the sculptures and artefacts. The ideas are displayed and other classes are invited to see the work.
See Key Resource: Using the local community/environment as a resource.
Before you start this activity, gather together as much information as you can about the local community as it used to be. You may have newspaper articles, notes of talks with older members of the community, names of people who would be happy to talk to your pupils.
You could make their work into a book about the history of your local area.
Background information / subject knowledge for teacher
Great Zimbabwe, or ‘houses of stone’, is the name given to hundreds of great stone ruins spread out over a 500 sq km (200 sq mi) area within the modern-day country of Zimbabwe, which itself is named after the ruins.
The ruins can be broken down into three distinct architectural groups. They are known as the Hill Complex, the Valley Complex and the famous Great Enclosure. Over 300 structures have been located so far in the Great Enclosure. The types of stone structures found on the site give an indication of the status of the citizenry. Structures that were more elaborate were built for the kings and situated further away from the centre of the city. It is thought that this was done in order to escape sleeping sickness.
What little evidence exists suggests that Great Zimbabwe also became a centre for trading, with artefacts suggesting that the city formed part of a trade network extending as far as China. Chinese pottery shards, coins from Arabia, glass beads and other non-local items have been excavated at Zimbabwe.
Nobody knows for sure why the site was eventually abandoned. Perhaps it was due to drought, perhaps due to disease or it simply could be that the decline in the gold trade forced the people who inhabited Great Zimbabwe to look elsewhere.
The ruins of Great Zimbabwe have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986.
More information can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Great_Zimbabwe
Teacher resource for planning or adapting to use with pupils
Original source: Dyer, C., Nisbet, J., Friedman, M., Johannesson, B., Jacobs, M., Roberts, B. & Seleti, Y. (2005). Looking into the Past: Source-based History for Grade 10. Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman. ISBN 0 636 06045 4.
Teacher resource for planning or adapting to use with pupils
Background information / subject knowledge for teacher
Culture is fluid – it changes over time – and the Zulu people of 100 years ago do not live as Zulu people do today. However, many of the customs, traditions, myths, legends and beliefs surrounding cattle remain the same.
Cattle remain central in traditional Zulu life. They make up the lobola, a gift of cattle from a groom's family to that of his bride. Lobola is more than a bride price, it is the way of cementing the kinship relationships that are so important in Zulu life. The cattle form part of the negotiation and ceremony that result in the marriage.
In a traditional Zulu homestead the cattle byre is the centre. All doors often face the byre where the cattle spend every evening. This close association has resulted in a rich legacy of cattle metaphor and simile in Zulu language.
It is said that ‘Inkunzi ayahlaba ngokumisa’ or, loosely translated, one should not judge a bull by his horns.
Cattle are also seen as the intermediary between people and the spirit world. A beast is slaughtered at weddings, funerals and other significant events and this is said to bring the ancestral shades closer to the living.
Adapted from: Zulu Cattle, Website
Pupil use
The role of cattle in the past | The role of cattle today |
Cattle were important for:
| Cattle are important for: |
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| |
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Key Focus Question: How can you use timelines and other sources to develop understanding of cause and effect?
Keywords: timelines; historical change; chronology; history; historical sources; debate
By the end of this section, you will have:
When developing an understanding of time past and passing, it is important to be able to sequence events into the order in which they happened.
Pupils often struggle with the concept of time. In this section, you will first help your pupils to divide time into periods that are more manageable and then, once they are able to do this, think about the order of events and why this is important. (With young pupils, this might be as simple as helping them order how they do certain tasks, leading on to more complex activities as their understanding grows.) You will then help your pupils identify the most important events in a particular passage of time. This can lead, with older pupils, into an analysis of cause and effect, and the understanding that there is usually more than one cause of an event.
Investigating a particular period in history, and trying to sequence events in the order in which they happened, will help pupils begin to see the links between events and some of the possible causes. Understanding the causes of change in our countries and societies may help us to live our lives better.
The purpose of this part is to explore how using timelines in history can be a useful way to divide time into more manageable ‘bits’, so that we know which ‘bit’ or period we are dealing with. This is particularly important when we are teaching history, because it is crucial that pupils understand the idea of change over time.
From an early age, pupils need help to sort and order events. As they grow and experience life, they can revisit activities like these ones, using more complex sequences and events.
(Section 1 in this module used timelines to explore family history. You might find it helpful to look at that section if you have not done so already, particularly if you are working with younger pupils.)
Ms Tetha Rugenza, who teaches history at a small school in Rwanda, wants to show her Grade 4 class how to divide up time into smaller periods. In order to do this, she plans a lesson where she and her pupils explore how to construct a timeline and divide it into periods.
Ms Rugenza decides to use the example of Rwanda. She draws a timeline on the board of the history of Rwanda. To help pupils understand the concept of periods, she divides the history of Rwanda into the pre-colonial, the colonial and the independence period. To give a sense of how long each of these periods is, she draws each period to scale.
She writes a list of important events, together with the date on which they took place, on separate pieces of paper and displays these on a table. Each event, she tells the class, falls into a particular period. She asks her pupils to work out which events fall into which period and in which order, doing a couple of examples herself. She calls out one event at a time and allows a pupil to come and stick it next to the appropriate place on the timeline. The rest of the class check that it has been put in the correct place. Through discussion, she helps the pupils if they are not sure where an event should go. She asks them if they can think of any other national events that should be placed on the timeline and adds them as appropriate.
Tell the class that they are going to make a timeline of the school year together.
(If you do not have enough resources for this to be done individually then it can be done in groups of up to five pupils.)
Discuss as a whole class whether there are some school events that could happen at any time of the year. Are there some that have to happen at a particular time? Why? (End-of-year exams, for example – why can’t they happen at the start of the year?)
The study of time and the order in which events took place over time is called chronology. This part explores how you can help pupils understand this sequencing of events, the relationship between the order events happen and the outcomes. In using these activities with pupils, you will realise the importance this has on their understanding of the past.
Mr Rutenga wants to show his Grade 5 pupils how chronology affects their understanding of events. He writes the following sentences on the chalkboard:
He asks the pupils to rearrange these sentences into an order that makes sense and to provide a reason for why they think the sentences should go in that particular order. Mr Rutenga uses this exercise to show how important it is to place events in a logical order.
However, he also wants pupils to begin to see the connections between events, and how one event influences another. He tells the class about the events in Rwanda since independence from Belgian rule to the genocide in April 1994. (See Resource 1: Some important historical events since independence.) Using some of these events, he and his pupils construct a timeline on the chalkboard. He has selected a short section of Resource 1 so that his pupils are not confused by too much information. He cuts these events up into strips and asks his pupils to put them in date order. He asks his pupils if they can identify the most important events that changed the course of Rwandan history and led to the genocide.
Mr Rutenga is pleased that his pupils are beginning to see chronology as the first step in explaining why things happen.
Timelines can help us compare the similarities and differences in a series of events for different people, or different groups, or different countries.
For example, if your pupils drew timelines for themselves, there would be some events the same (starting school) and others different (birth of baby brother or sister for example).
Using timelines to compare the history of a variety of African countries during the time of moving to independence can help your pupils see common themes but also differences between their experiences.
Thabo Sinono organised her class to work in groups to make a comparative multiple timeline that helped them to learn about the experiences of their own and other countries’ journey towards independence.
For each country that she chose she made a long strip of paper (she did this by sticking A4 pieces of paper together, one piece equalling five years). See Resource 3: African timelines template.
This would enable the groups, when finished, to place one under another to allow for easy comparison.
With her own books, and books and other materials borrowed from a colleague in a secondary school, the groups carried out their own guided research to find out the major events for each chosen country and then wrote each event in at the correct time on the chart. (For younger classes you could provide the events and dates yourself to help them construct the timeline.) Resource 2: Key events in the move to independence provides examples of some key dates and also suggests websites where further information can be found if necessary.
Mrs Sinono made the timeline for ‘World events’ as an example (World War II, independence for India, first flight in space, the Cold War, Vietnam War, the invention of the Internet, Invasion of Iraq etc.).
She made sure that each ‘country’ wrote ‘Independence’ in the appropriate time spot in another colour.
When all the groups had finished, she asked them to line up their timelines one under the other neatly. This enabled easy comparison between the countries.
(This sort of work can easily be extended. Groups can carry on researching their designated countries to find out more about them: languages spoken; major industries; agriculture; cities and towns etc. They could draw maps of their countries and label them. There are many possibilities.)
Background information / subject knowledge for teacher
1300s – Tutsis migrate into what is now Rwanda, which was already inhabited by the Twa and Hutu peoples.
1600s – Tutsi King Ruganzu Ndori subdues central Rwanda and outlying Hutu areas.
Late 1800s – Tutsi King Kigeri Rwabugiri establishes a unified state with a centralised military structure.
1858 – British explorer Hanning Speke is the first European to visit the area.
1890 – Rwanda becomes part of German East Africa.
1916 – Belgian forces occupy Rwanda.
1923 – Belgium granted League of Nations mandate to govern Ruanda-Urundi, which it ruled indirectly through Tutsi kings.
1946 – Ruanda-Urundi becomes UN trust territory governed by Belgium.
Independence
1957 – Hutus issue manifesto calling for a change in Rwanda's power structure to give them a voice commensurate with their numbers; Hutu political parties formed.
1959 – Tutsi King Kigeri V, together with tens of thousands of Tutsis, forced into exile in Uganda following inter-ethnic violence.
1961 – Rwanda proclaimed a republic.
1962 – Rwanda becomes independent with a Hutu, Gregoire Kayibanda, as president; many Tutsis leave the country.
1963 – Some 20,000 Tutsis killed following an incursion by Tutsi rebels based in Burundi.
1973 – President Gregoire Kayibanda ousted in military coup led by Juvenal Habyarimana.
1978 – New constitution ratified; Habyarimana elected president.
1988 – Some 50,000 Hutu refugees flee to Rwanda from Burundi following ethnic violence there.
1990 – Forces of the rebel, mainly Tutsi, Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invade Rwanda from Uganda.
1991 – New multi-party constitution promulgated.
Genocide
1993 – President Habyarimana signs a power-sharing agreement with the Tutsis in the Tanzanian town of Arusha, ostensibly signalling the end of civil war; UN mission sent to monitor the peace agreement.
1994 April – Habyarimana and the Burundian president are killed after their plane is shot down over Kigali; RPF launches a major offensive; extremist Hutu militia and elements of the Rwandan military begin the systematic massacre of Tutsis. Within 100 days, around 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus are killed; Hutu militias flee to Zaire, taking with them around 2 million Hutu refugees.
Adapted from: BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/ go/ pr/ fr/ -/ 1/ hi/ world/ africa/ country_profiles/ 1070329.stm (Accessed 2008)
Background information / subject knowledge for teacher
1957 | Ghana becomes first independent black state in Africa under Kwame Nkrumah through Gandhi-inspired rallies, boycotts and strikes, forcing the British to transfer power over the former colony of the Gold Coast. | |
1958 | Chinua Achebe (Nigeria): Things Fall Apart, written in ‘African English’, examines Western civilisation's threat to traditional values and reaches a large, diverse international audience. | |
1958 | All-African People's Conference: Resolution on Imperialism and Colonialism, Accra, 5–13 December 1958 | |
1954– 1962 | French colonies (Francophone Africa) oppose continued French rule despite concessions, though many eager to maintain economic and cultural ties to France – except in Algeria, with a white settler population of 1 million. Bitterly vicious civil war in Algeria ensues until independence is gained in 1962, six years after Morocco and Tunisia had received independence. | |
1958 | White (Dutch-descent) Afrikaners officially gain independence from Great Britain in South Africa. | |
1964 | Nelson Mandela,on trial for sabotage with other ANC leaders before the Pretoria Supreme Court, delivers his eloquent and courageous ‘Speech from the Dock’ before he is imprisoned for the next 25 years in the notorious South African prison Robben Island. | |
1960– 1961 | Zaire (formerly Belgian Congo, the richest European colony in Africa) becomes independent from Belgium in 1960. Then, in Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi), ‘charismatic nationalist Patrice Lumumba was ... martyred in 1961, with the connivance of the [US] Central Intelligence Agency and a 30-year-old Congolese colonel who would soon become president of the country, Joseph Deséré Mobutu.’ (Bill Berkeley, ‘Zaire: An African Horror Story’, The Atlantic Monthly, August 1993; rpt. Atlantic Online) | |
1962 | Algeria (of Arab and Berber peoples) wins independence from France; over 900,000 white settlers leave the newly independent nation. | |
1963 | Multi-ethnic Kenya (East Africa) declares independence from the British. | |
1963 | Charter of the Organisation of African Unity, 25 May 1963. | |
mid-60s | Most former European colonies in Africa gain independence and European colonial era effectively ends. However, Western economic and cultural dominance, and African leaders’ and parties’ corruption intensify the multiple problems facing the new nations. | |
1965 | Rhodesia: Unilateral Declaration of Independence Documents. | |
1966 | Bechuanaland gains independence and becomes Botswana. | |
1970s | Portugal loses African colonies, including Angola and Mozambique. | |
1976 | Cheikh Anta Diop (Senegal, 1923–1986), one of the great African intellectuals of the 20th century, publishes the influential and controversial book, The African Origin of Civilization, his project to ‘identify the distortions [about African history] we have learned and correct them for future generations’. | |
1980 | Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia) gains independence from large white settler population after years of hostilities. | |
1970s–1980s | Police state of South African white minority rulers hardens to maintain blatantly racist and inequitable system of apartheid, resulting in violence, hostilities, strikes, massacres headlined worldwide. | |
1986 | Nigerian poet/dramatist/writer Wole Soyinka awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature. | |
1988 | Egyptian novelist and short story writer Nabuib Mahfouz awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first prizewinning writer with Arabic as his native tongue. | |
1994 | The Hutus massacre up to a million Tutsis in Rwanda; then fearing reprisals from the new Tutsi government, more than a million Hutu refugees fled Rwanda in a panicked mass migration that captured the world's attention. | |
1996 | 500,000 of Hutu refugees streamed back into Rwanda to escape fighting in Zaire. | |
2001 | After 38 years in existence, the Organisation for African Unity (OAU) is replaced by the African Union. |
Teacher resource for planning or adapting to use with pupils
Key Focus Question: How can you use artefacts and other evidence to explore local and national history?
Keywords: artefacts; evidence; group working; local history; environment; questioning
By the end of this section, you will have:
Understanding who you are and having good self-esteem is enhanced if you have a strong sense of your identity and can see your place in the bigger pattern of life. Studying what happened in the past can contribute to this. Through the activities in this section, you will encourage your pupils to think about history as it relates to them. Using group work, inviting visitors into the classroom and using practical hands-on activities to investigate artefacts will allow your pupils to share ideas and develop their historical skills.
Handling artefacts or looking at pictures of them provides a means for you to draw attention to both the factual aspects of history and the interpretation involved. Something that will help you in this work is collecting resources as and when you can. Often it is possible to find old utensils and artefacts from the home and in markets.
This part will help you to plan tasks for your pupils to think about how things that we use in our everyday lives have changed over time. For example, by looking at what we use for cooking now and what we used in the past, we can begin to think about how people used to live. We can compare utensils and, from this, speculate about what it would have been like to live in the past and use such artefacts. This will stimulate pupils’ thinking about themselves and their place in the local community and its history.
Mr Ndomba, a Standard 5 history teacher in Mbinga township, Tanzania, has decided to use artefacts used in farming in his lesson to stimulate pupils’ interest and encourage them to think historically.
He organises the class into groups, giving each group an actual artefact or a picture of one. He asks the groups to look closely at their object or picture and to write as much as they can about it by just looking at it. His pupils do well, as they like discussion, and it is clear to Mr Ndomba that they are interested and enjoying speculating about their artefacts. (See Key Resource: Using group work in your classroom.)
After a few minutes, he asks each group to swap its picture or artefact with that of the next group and do the same exercise again. When they finish, he asks the two groups to join and share their views of the two pictures or artefacts. What do they think the artefacts are? What are they made of? What are they used for? How are they made? They agree on five key points to write about each artefact with one group doing one and the other group the second. Mr Ndoma puts the artefacts on the table with their five key points and makes a display for all to look at for a few days.
At the end of the week, he asks each group to write what they are certain they can say about the object on one side of a piece of paper and on the other side they write things they are not sure about, including any questions. For him, it is not so important that there is agreement on what the object is, but that there is lively, well-argued debate on what it might be used for and how old it might be.
Read Resource 1: Using artefacts in the classroom before you start.
As a whole class, look at each artefact in turn and discuss the different ideas. Agree which idea is most popular and ask the person who brought the object in what they know about it. Or send them home with some questions to ask and bring answers back to share with the class the next day.
One of the purposes of teaching history to your pupils is to allow them to understand and discover their own and their community’s identity. As a social studies teacher, even of primary school children, you should always be looking for interesting ways of helping pupils understand this past, their history. Considering how local customs, everyday tasks and the objects used for them have changed helps builds this identity.
Mrs Ndonga has asked two older members of the local community to come to class in their traditional dress and talk about what has changed about traditional dress since they were young.
Before the visit, Mrs Ndonga reads Key Resource: Using the local community/environment as a resource and, with her class, prepares for the visit. Once the date and time have been agreed, the pupils devise some questions to ask the visitors about what has changed over time.
On the day of the visit, the classroom is organised and the welcome party goes to meet the visitors. The class is excited but shy with the visitors. However, the visitors are so pleased to come and talk that everyone soon relaxes and there is much discussion about the dress they are wearing and the importance of each piece. The visitors also brought some traditional clothes that belonged to their parents for the children to see.
After the visitors have left, Mrs Ndonga asks her pupils what they had learned that they did not know before, and she is surprised and pleased by what they remembered and liked about the event.
This activity aims to put in place a frame that you, as a teacher, can use to conduct a classroom discussion about any aspect of social studies or history. In this case, we are looking at local artefacts and their traditional use.
You may be able to organise a craft lesson with the visitor, so your pupils can try the particular crafts.
History is always about balancing subjective claims (peoples’ personal accounts and opinions) against objective (independent) evidence. When exploring artefacts, rather than oral or written evidence, the same balancing applies. There are definite things that can be said about a pot for example, i.e. its shape, what it is made of etc. Something like ‘what it was used for’ can only be speculation, based on what we use such pots for now. By looking at the pot carefully, consulting old drawings and paintings and talking to others, we can build up a more certain picture of how it was used.
This part explores ways of helping pupils question their thinking and understanding about artefacts.
Mrs Mashinini decides to use a book of letters of how children remember the events of the uprisings against apartheid that started in Soweto in 1976. She plans to use the book Two Dogs and Freedom as the text for the lesson. She chooses a range of the short letters to read to the class of the children’s experiences of the uprising. After studying these accounts carefully, Mrs Mashinini realises that they are based on subjective evidence, and thinks that it would be a good idea to compare them to more objective historical evidence in the lesson. Therefore, Mrs Mashinini gathers a range of documents and books written by historians that examine the conflicts in townships after 1977.
She makes a summary of the key ideas to use in class.
First, she asks each group to read the chosen paragraphs from Two Dogs and Freedom and then asks them to look at her chart of key events and thoughts by respected historians. Do they see any similarities or differences in these accounts of the same event? They discuss whether the subjective accounts in the book can be supported by the objective historical evidence put forward by historians. They agree that both give insights. The book is people’s perceptions and can vary according to their beliefs, but the chart just has facts.
At the end, Mrs Mashinini summarises for her class the difference between subjective and objective evidence when looking at the past.
When the display is complete, ask other classes to visit your exhibition. You could even ask parents and the local community to come to see the exhibits. You may find out more from your visitors about some of your artefacts.
Background information / subject knowledge for teacher
The opportunity to handle actual artefacts is a unique experience. For some reason that no one is quite sure of, the act of touching an object, which obviously has its own history and story, inspires everyone. Pupils will inevitably be curious about the artefacts and this will naturally lead to good discussion.
Handling an artefact allows pupils to use their senses, develop questioning and problem-solving skills, strengthen their understanding of a period, and empathise with people from the past.
What is the purpose of an artefact handling session?
Artefact handling sessions can be used to:
What questions should I ask during an artefact handling session?
The type of question you ask will depend on what you are using the artefacts for. The questions below should help you get the most out of using the artefacts.
Questions about the physical characteristics of an object
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Questions about the design and construction of an object
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Questions about the importance and value of an object
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Questions about the function of an object
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Teaching with objects – some approaches
Many of the approaches detailed below can also be used when interrogating documents, prints and paintings with pupils.
Visual stimulus
Objects can be used to stimulate discussion at the beginning of a lesson. The same objects can be used to recap what pupils have learned and to see if any of their ideas and understandings have changed in the course of the lesson.
Historical inquiry
A selection of objects can be used by pupils for an exercise in historical inquiry – obtaining information from sources. Allow time for pupils to look at the object carefully before exploring some of the following questions:
Drawing comparisons and relating objects to each other
Use two objects or images side by side and ask pupils to draw comparisons, exploring the similarities and differences. Use groups of objects and talk about the relationships between them.
Representations and interpretation
Some artefacts may show evidence of a particular viewpoint or bias. Who created the object and for what purpose? Is it an item of propaganda? Does it tell the whole story? What doesn’t it tell?
Other activities using objects include
Prediction activities – show pupils an object and ask them to work out which period of history it relates to.
Case study – pupils can use a single object or group of objects to build up a case study, for example, life in West Africa before the slave trade.
Groupings – pupils can group objects into sets that have particular things in common (such as the materials they are made from, the country they originated from, how they were used). Pupils can consider how to curate a museum display by grouping objects in different ways.
Caption or label writing – pupils can write their own captions or exhibition labels, either from a modern viewpoint or as if they were writing at the time the object was made.
Emotional intelligence – pupils can list adjectives that describe how they feel about an object, demonstrating empathy as well as understanding.
Creative responses – pupils can respond to an object through creative writing, drama or art.
Which subjects can benefit from using artefacts?
Learning from objects is beneficial to subjects across the curriculum:
Pupil use